How you can help preserve our sporting heritage

September 30, 2025 | Diane Webb

National Sporting Heritage Day is on 30 September and in conjunction with this I attended a webinar run by Sporting Heritage on identifying and supporting collections at risk.

So, what collections are at risk? Virtually everything in some form, from individuals and local club level, to leagues and county, to national and even international level, whether in original hard copy form or information held digitally.

In our sport, there have been some catastrophic losses, with perhaps the most well-known being when the ETTA offices received two direct hits during the first blitz in World War II and everything was destroyed, all records, correspondence, furniture etc. 

The history of about 15 years activity for table tennis, the carefully prepared address list of players and ticket purchasers all went, all the handbooks and innumerable records necessary for such a large organisation were under a huge pile of rubble.

When the then assistant secretary, Marjorie Carrington, saw it she sat down and wept and never really forgave Mr Hitler! Work began to build the collection up.

There have been other instances of loss, information held on computers which crashed and not backed up, with the loss of hundreds of photographs and other documentation. There is also loss through physical damage – mould, water, fire etc – or through theft, malicious destruction or neglect.

Often if someone who has held records moves house, a clear-out is effected and valuable material thrown out, and similarly when someone dies or just loses interest. The list is almost endless.

With digitally held records there are also issues in ensuring material is not lost. Websites change, servers change and information is not necessarily transferred to the new website or server. Digitised material is scattered to the ether.

With the loss of printed material, such as programmes or magazines, it is harder and often more time-consuming to find information searching through many website articles rather than having everything in one place. With the decline in local press, that source of information is also lost.

If you add to that, there is what could be called institutional memory which can put collections at risk. A change in personnel whether staff, board and committee members or volunteers results in the loss of personal knowledge. Changes may mean collections are not known about and their value may not be appreciated.

If all this sounds doom and gloom, what can be done?

The first step is to identify what you have and, as importantly, identify what is missing. Know who holds what and where and who has legal ownership. Positively manage your archives, have a plan and include succession planning. Make as many people aware of your heritage as possible, draw up an inventory, have a ‘transcribathon†or ‘scanathon†to digitise material.

Let people who make donations know their material is appreciated and valued and where possible displayed, create oral histories, share what you have, make new people aware of your heritage, have preserving your heritage as an agenda item at your next committee meeting and/or contact former members to see what they have. Ensure storage is suitable and safe.

As with most things in life there is likely to be a cost, whether paying for storage in the cloud or in a storage facility or purchasing an external hard drive. Perhaps the most important cost of all is peopleâ€s time.

It may seem a huge task but it is important to remember even if you can only do a small part in helping preserve your heritage everything you do will leave it in a better condition than when you started.

What have Table Tennis England been doing to preserve their heritage? Various projects have been undertaken or are ongoing and much of this can be found in the ‘Visit the document archive†section on the website.

Oral histories are also being recorded, records created, videos transferred to digital format, a Flickr page for many of our artefacts and a number of other areas of work.

If you would like to discuss anything in this article or would like to help preserve English table tennis heritage, then please contact me.

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